Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize: The Case for Blonde on Blonde as Literature

Does Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature? That’s a question some casual fans and detractors are asking now that the prize has been awarded to the 75-year-old singer, songwriter, tour-horse, author, broadcaster, and inveterate shape-shifter. Dylan’s oeuvre is vast—there are entire albums that even I, a fan well on the obsessive side of the scale, have never listened to in full—but pieces of it stand out as timeless monuments, however eager some may be to dismiss them as “dad rock.” And while his stark, haunting protest songs are what vaulted him into the uncomfortable role of “Voice of a Generation,” it’s the double album Blonde on Blonde, released in 1966, that provided the fullest indication yet of what an ambitious, unruly artist he truly was.

The album is a plea, a curse, and a benediction all wrapped in one. Affection, derision, worship, and betrayal all vie for the upper hand in one sonic and poetic masterpiece after another. Fifty years after its release, it’s still hard to figure out exactly what was eating Bob Dylan when he recorded Blonde on Blonde, but it’s not hard to see why it will be remembered as one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll albums of all time. Only a 24-year-old at the top of the world could sound this precocious, this romantic, this world-weary, this incorrigible.

When Dylan and his backing band, then known as the Hawks, convened in New York for the first recording session, he had just married the model Sara Lownds. Before decamping to Nashville for additional sessions, Dylan paused for the birth of his and Sara’s first child, Jesse. But Dylan’s fraught relationship and painfully awkward breakup with Joan Baez, who had vouched for him with the folk community and helped launch him to superstardom, was not far at all in the past, nor was his complicated friendship with the troubled Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick.

That jumble of relationships left a tangled imprint on the lyrics on Blonde on Blonde, which veer back and forth between loving and lacerating. We know (or think we know) that “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is about Sara (because an enraged Dylan will later say as much in the lyrics to 1976’s “Sara”), but who is the object of, say, “I Want You”? Is it a love song to Sara, or a song of lust, consummated or otherwise, aimed at Edie—or someone else entirely?

Dylan’s wild imagination only adds to the confusion. For every clear image drawn from real life, there are a dozen animated by silly word play, absurdist scenarios, and walk-on characters worthy of Cervantes and Chaucer—or, for that matter, Jack London and the hobo memoirist Jim Tully. Even “Visions of Johanna,” which begins with cinematic specificity inside a New York apartment with coughing heat pipes and country music on the radio, eventually erupts into a mad hallucination involving a peddler, a countess, a fiddler, and a fish truck. (Those shifts in perspective make “Visions of Johanna” one of Dylan’s most famously literary songs; chances are, the Nobel committee had it in mind, along with 1975’s “Tangled Up in Blue.”)

Still, even if much of this symbolism isn’t possible to fully pin down (despite the misguided efforts of countless “Dylanologists”), it’s easy enough to get a feel for what Dylan was struggling with. There is an emotional truth to these songs, even when the literal truth keeps scurrying around the corner before you can get a good look at it. “Pledging My Time” describes taking a chance on a new relationship, despite the knowledge that the odds are stacked against success. (“Somebody got lucky / But it was an accident.”) “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat” is a parable of sexual betrayal. (“I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me / But I sure wish he’d take that off his head.”)

“Temporary Like Achilles” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” like “Maggie’s Farm” before them, are about being at the mercy of a much stronger woman. (“Is your heart made out of stone, or is it lime / Or is it just solid rock?”) “Fourth Time Around” is about tormenting such a woman through sheer stubborn lousy male behavior. (“I stood there and hummed / I tapped on her drum and asked her, ‘How come?’”)

Again and again, Dylan adds layer after layer of color, plot, and character without ever fully obscuring a song’s emotional meaning. You don’t quite know what he means when he says, “Now people just get uglier and I have no sense of time,” but there’s no mistaking the import of “Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want.”

And then there are the songs where Dylan lets the dealer see his cards. “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” is both boorish and weirdly tender, depicting with unflinching frankness one of those lopsided relationships that bring nothing but misery to everyone involved. The narrator isn’t in love—far from it—but he wants the person whose heart he’s breaking to know that it’s not her fault. It’s not even personal. “I didn’t mean to make you so sad / You just happened to be there, that’s all.” He describes multiple misunderstandings, one of them leading to an unexpected argument: “An’ I told you, as you clawed out my eyes / That I never meant to do you any harm.” This is charmless but recognizable behavior—the kind that rarely shows up in poetry or Hollywood movies but occurs in real life more often than we’d like to admit.

“Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” tells a similar story, except this time the narrator is the one who’s in too deep. After being jerked around one too many times, he’s finally cutting bait. “You say you got some other kind of lover / And yes, I believe you do / You say my kisses are not like his / But this time I’m not gonna tell you why that is / I’m just gonna let you pass.” This, too, will strike anyone who’s spent time on the dating circuit as an entirely familiar scenario: falling for the wrong person, getting sucked in by his or her games, then forcing yourself to quit chasing that person around despite the undeniable temptation. Is Edie the object of this song? That would be my guess, but it’s hard to know.

“Just Like a Woman” sometimes feels more like a generational critique (“Nobody feels any pain”) than a first-person tale of woe, but clearly it’s rooted in some deep romantic disappointment. “But when we meet again / Introduced as friends / Please don’t let on that you knew me when / I was hungry and it was your world”—is there any human over the age of 20 who can’t relate to those words? Those same words point to Joan Baez as the target of this tune—she was, after all, the world-famous folk singer who called a largely unknown Dylan onstage during her headlining performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. And anyone who’s seen D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back and witnessed Baez’s quiet agony as Dylan passive-aggressively blows her off two years later can imagine him zapping her with those lines about aching just like a woman but breaking just like a little girl.

When Blonde on Blonde was released on vinyl, it became the first double album in rock ’n’ roll history. And the entire fourth side was dedicated to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” a strangely mournful ode to Dylan’s new wife whose sheer duration surprised even the band. (“I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?” drummer Kenny Buttrey later remembered thinking.) Of all the songs on the album, this one hides its meaning most thoroughly, burying whatever real-world scenario that may have inspired it under an avalanche of hallucinogenic images, from “The kings of Tyrus with their convict list” to “Your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row.” Even the chorus is willfully opaque: “My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Should I leave them by your gate / Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?” It doesn’t have quite the same ring as the Clash’s “Should I stay or should I go?,” but after five or six repetitions, you start to understand what he means.

Writing for the aptly named Highbrow Magazine in 2012, Benjamin Wright cites the cultural critic Ellen Willis’s theory that Dylan’s operating principle is taken from the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud: “Je est un autre.” “I am another.” Dylan is constantly playing hide-and-seek with his own image, his own legend, the expectations he himself has set. It’s an emphatically literary way to approach writing and life. The poet William Butler Yeats espoused a “Doctrine of the Mask,” whereby a poem should project the opposite of the poet’s personality. The work is better that way, he believed, and he was probably right.

Blonde on Blonde was both the culmination of Dylan’s electric period—which had begun the previous year with Bringin’ It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited—and the end of it. He perfected the sound, and then set it aside. Whether or not Dylan’s famous motorcycle crash of July 1966 really happened, he was done playing rock star and wanted to try something different.

He’s been doing that ever since, by turns delighting and maddening his hard-core fans as well as the millions of people around the world (billions?) who know and like a few of his songs. But the literary seeds of his mid-60s work continue to bear fruit in recent songs like “Mississippi” and “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’.” Dylan has ironed out his imagery, for the most part, and overcome his fear of sincerity. He lets the feelings come to center stage and take a bow. But the wit, the vulnerability, the cruelty, the characters imported from the old weird America, the images that lodge in your mind and never leave—those are the hallmarks of one man, an artist who’ll be remembered long after the dad jokes have disappeared from our time lines.

Bringing It All Back Home recording session, Columbia Records, Studio A, New York, January 1965.

Photograph by Daniel Kramer.

On the road from New York City to Buffalo with Joan Baez, November 1964.

Photograph by Daniel Kramer.

Dylan with friends Peter Yarrow and John Hammond Jr. in New York, 1965.

Photograph by Daniel Kramer.

Dylan in Woodstock, 1964.

Photograph by Daniel Kramer.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in literature as well as the song where Dylan angrily recalls writing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”